Rethinking the Modernity of Bernanos: a Girardian Perspective

1 Rethinking the modernity of Bernanos: a Girardian perspective Abstract The critical consensus about the modernity of Georges Bernanos’s political writings is too dependent on hegemonic social and cultural theories. While Pierrette Renard’s long essay on Bernanos rightly identifies his stylistic modernity, it wrongly depicts his polemical work as a search for nostalgic analgesia and as a statement of quasi-Nietzschean revolt. Sven Storelv’s attempt to reread Bernanos’s polemical works by relating them to the Book of Revelation is not substantiated by his evidence, but still highlights key Bernanosian themes which can be found systematically related in the theoretical oeuvre of René Girard. Analysis of Bernanos’s Scandale de la vérité, Nous autres Français and Les Enfants humiliés in this light reveals in fact the links that Bernanos makes between imitation, desire, possessiveness and violence, and the myths that are generated to hide this process. Key words Bernanos, Girard, modernity, desire, violence, myth 2 Since the 1990s there has been a broad critical consensus that the polemical writings of Georges Bernanos are paradoxically modern in substance and style. In his essay on Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938), Bernanos’s tract about the Spanish Civil War, Michel Estève (1994) underlines how Bernanos’s dissent from the textbook Catholic response to the war was evidence of his affirming the primacy of conscience over ideology. Pierrette Renard (1998) has mounted the most complex and detailed argument in the secondary literature to demonstrate how Bernanos, in his polemical writings, was a moderne malgré lui. Most recently, Claire Daudin has sustained this critical tradition, arguing in Dieu a-t-il besoin de l’écrivain? (2009) that Bernanos’s personal faith bespeaks no corporate allegiance to the Church. In keeping with the view that resistance to modernity is another manifestation of modernity, Bernanos has also been classed as one of the anarchistes de droite (Richard, 1988), alongside the likes of Léon Bloy or Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This approach depicts Bernanos as a child of the Belle Epoque who shared the violent scepticism of the anti- Enlightenment about the Republican political project, but ploughed his own furrow in reacting against it. The work of all these critics is serious, profound and extensive. Moreover, a rapid survey of Bernanos’s polemical writings, particularly from 1936 onwards, appears to corroborate their conclusions, especially when we consider how much Bernanos speaks about l’homme libre, or the extent to which he distances himself from the torchbearers of the anti- Enlightement in the period of l’entre-deux-guerres, with the persistent exception of Edouard Drumont. Still, even if the concept of Bernanos’s modernity allows us to account for certain aspects of his writing, its counter-intuitive nature gives rise to the suspicion that its motives are far from disinterested. In spite of what critics have asserted about his pertinence to the young, there is no particular proclivity among French youth for the works or the views of Bernanos. Indeed, since French youth has shown itself persistently deaf to Bernanos’s 3 repeated appeals to its untainted idealism, and since many of the disputes in which Bernanos was involved are now long dead, one may legitimately wonder whether the critical framing of Bernanos as moderne is an attempt to proof his work against its creeping irrelevance. Otherwise, such rebranding smacks of a kind of well-intentioned but ideologically inspired gerrymandering to ensure clear ground appears between him and the accursed torchbearers of the anti-Lumières. Bernanos is one of us; he couldn’t be one of them. The starting point of this present investigation is that such an agenda of ideological sanitisation, combined with critical overdependence on the discourses of hegemonic social theory, has occluded important dynamics within Bernanos’s political writings. Both have, for example, tended to obscure the fact that Bernanos’s attacks on Franco’s Spain or on the French right of the late 1930s, are rooted in an aversion to violently imposed social unity which also lies, paradoxically, at the root of Bernanos’s contempt for contractual or democratic politics. They have likewise narrowed criticism’s account of the paradoxes of Bernanos’s Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune in which Bernanos, the right-wing Catholic and monarchist, embraces a modern conceptualisation of freedom – a position that this author has hitherto argued (Sudlow, 2003) – by taking sides against the nationalists during the Spanish Civil War Now, it is also counter-intuitive to qualify contractual models of society as violent. Nevertheless, there are two reasons why it is pertinent to a discussion of Bernanos’s polemical writings. First, as one who deprecates Enlightenment individualism, Bernanos deplores the radical autonomy of subjects who, from a contractual perspective, form a unity which can be coerced by the will of the majority. Bernanos’s resistance to the democratic will cannot thus simply be reduced to the effects of extreme individualism. It is this paradox that descriptions of Bernanos as anarchist fail to account for. Second, as a moralist, Bernanos constantly eschews the appeal to abstract notions such as freedom of conscience, and engages 4 instead in a process of myth-deconstruction by attacking the coercive agendas which political discourses of all shades seek to veil. Corralling Bernanos’s analyses within the vocabulary of abstract moral discourse thus proves an obstacle to understanding the imaginative sensibilities and iconoclastic insights which underpin his frequent jeremiads. Those who plead in favour of a Bernanos moderne do so, therefore, at the cost of these distinctions. Given these reservations about existing interpretations of Bernanos’s political writings, the aim of this chapter is to challenge and enrich critical approaches to Bernanos’s polemical work. To this end, it will first explore and assess in greater detail the widely accepted arguments in favour of the modernity of Bernanos’s political writings. Then it will address Sven Storelv’s analysis of Bernanos’s polemical writings which breaks with the consensus that tries to define them in relation to modernity. Lastly, this chapter will consider the extent to which René Girard’s mimetic theory provides a more useful tool than these other methods for understanding Bernanos’s many complexities as an observer of French political life between the wars. For the purposes of this chapter, with its exploratory aims and its limited space, soundings of Bernanos’s political writings will be restricted to Scandale de la vérité, Nous autres Français and Les Enfants humiliés, three tracts written after the Spanish Civil War but before the Blitzkrieg which the Germans launched against France in spring 1940. Forming a loose trilogy – ‘trois oeuvres d’un seul tenant’, as Jacqus Chabot has observed (1971: 536) – these texts represent the state of Bernanos’s political témoignage on the eve of France’s crushing defeat. Prima facie, Girard’s mimetic theory, which focuses on the relationship between desire, deceit and violence in literary, cultural, political and religious contexts, appears eminently suitable to rereading the writings of Bernanos, a figure often characterised as temperamentally violent, and who was preoccupied with violence throughout his writing career. This chapter will argue, however, that rather than being a pure agent of violence, 5 Bernanos belongs to that tradition of writers who, according to Girard (1961; 1972; 1982), expose the illusions and myths which veil mimetic desire and the violence it can unleash on the individual and societal levels. Thus this chapter will aim to resituate Bernanos’s apparent anarchism and his belated disdain for Counter-Enlightenment figures in the context of his engagement with moral and cultural dynamics which would later become central to Girard’s mimetic theory. In corroboration of our findings, we will also consider in the course of the analysis how Girard’s last work, Achever Clausewitz (2007), strangely echoes some of the predictions of uncontrollable violence to be found in Bernanos’s tracts. For it seems that what Girard has identified as an apocalyptic escalation of violence — la montée aux extrêmes — was heralded already by Bernanos, caught between the horrors he witnessed in Majorca and the coming world war. Renard’s Bernanos moderne and Storelv’s Bernanos prophète The analysis and assessment of two key approaches to Bernanos’s polemics will serve as a launching point for developing a new critical framework. The first approach is found in Renard’s essay on Bernanos’s modernity which stands as an exemplar of the critical consensus noted at the beginning of this article. The second is found in two essays by Sven Storelv who, by using the imagery of the Book of Revelation as a basis for his commentary on Bernanos’s Essais et écrits de combat I, already foreshadows the Girardian analysis of Bernanos’s polemical writings which this chapter will aim to elaborate further on. Renard Renard’s essay in Etudes bernanosiennes 21 puts before us three principal arguments to sustain the critical depiction of Bernanos’s modernity. First, Renard argues that his sense of the liquidation of the past and the disorientation this induces are signs that he feels the 6 modern impossibility of integrating experience and knowledge (Renard, 1998: 82); second, she asserts that since Bernanos sees this disintegration as a negative thing, he assumes a constant attitude of combat against it, whence the habitual violence of his rhetoric, or his call to youth for a chivalrous ralliement, or his definition of prayer as revolt (Renard, 1998: 121); and third, she observes that Bernanos’s modernity is further confirmed by his témoignage, the literary form that his combat assumes (Renard, 1998: 123-128). This is manifested, for Renard, in the freedom of criticism he exercises against the Church, and then in the blending of fiction and history in his last polemical works which, again according to Renard, show him retreating into a kind of subjective enclave to comment on events (Renard, 1998: 139).

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